Re: [Caml-list] how to encourage adoption of OCaml?

[Ashish Agarwal <agarwal1975@gmail.com>]

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On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 1:02 PM, Yotam Barnoy <yotambarnoy@gmail.com> wrote:

Also, could someone with ocaml github permissions start a gitter.im
> page for OCaml? It should be relatively painless.
>

Can you explain what needs to be done exactly. When I'm logged in, I see
nothing at gitter.im/ocaml and when I'm logged out I see links for
ocaml/oasis and ocaml/opam. So something already works.



On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 12:54 PM, Mohamed Iguernlala
> <iguer.auto@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hi there,
> >
> > I guess you found inria.fr and not infria.fr :-). If it's the case, the
> > first thing you should notice when visiting it is the message:
> >
> > "This site is updated infrequently. For up-to-date information, please
> visit
> > the new OCaml website at ocaml.org."
> >
> > and on ocaml.org, you'll find a "modern website" with a "more
> conventional"
> > extension. One click later (on the Community
> > item of the upper menu), you'll get the information you need about
> mailing
> > lists.
> >
> > Regards,
> >
> > - Mohamed.
> >
> >
> >
> > Le 08/07/2016 17:16, Duane Johnson a écrit :
> >
> >
> > On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 8:40 AM, Gabriel Scherer <
> gabriel.scherer@gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> >>
> >> Adoption is interesting but, as Tony Hoare put it, we are not fashion
> >> designers. The best thing I can think of is to communicate more and
> better,
> >> talk about the cool world that is being done in the OCaml communities,
> and
> >> importantly talking about it outside it. Supporting software projects
> that
> >> have a potential for impact outside the OCaml community is also key --
> Coq,
> >> MLdonkey, Coccinelle, Flow, the SLAM static verifier toolkit, just to
> name a
> >> few.
> >
> >
> >
> > As someone who just signed up to this mailing list, may I offer some
> > observations?
> >
> > - my first impression of OCaml community was through reddit.com/r/ocaml.
> As
> > a reddit user, I would rank /r/ocaml as "barely alive but stable"--in
> other
> > words, the upvotes-per-thread there are in the single digits and low
> > double-digits showing people exist there, but it is not a thriving
> > community.
> > - next, I tried to find a google group. It was hard to find any
> substantial
> > and popular OCaml groups there. There was an OCaml aggregation list, but
> it
> > wasn't clear that it was a discussion group. My first thought was, Is
> there
> > no mailing list? I searched around and found the infria.fr domain. To an
> > outsider, this lends no credibility or brand-name familiarity. Not only
> is
> > the web domain unfamiliar, but the website does not look welcoming--it
> > appears to be out of the 90s.
> > - signing up for a mailing list is slow and unrewarding. I'd much rather
> > sign up for a more modern community technology like reddit, facebook,
> slack,
> > or google groups.
> > - I clicked "Info" to get more info about the mailing list on infria.fr
> and
> > it says "Private information" inside a white bubble. Ok...
> > - I looked for a chat community, and IRC is the only option. This signals
> > "old tech community" to me. Slack or gitter.im is a more inclusive,
> modern
> > community. In order to participate in IRC, one must always be connected.
> > This makes it more difficult for outsiders to come in and feel like they
> can
> > 'catch up' on the conversation (Yes, I know there are chat logs, but this
> > feature is not an integrated part of IRC).
> >
> > In summary, all of the signals that I usually depend on to evaluate the
> > community around a technology are either weak or give me the impression
> of
> > "old and barely stable". New, exciting technologies that I've seen tend
> to
> > embrace and tap in to existing community platforms (slack, reddit,
> github,
> > gitbook, google groups) in order to leverage the platform and amplify
> their
> > advertising signal.
> >
> > Duane Johnson
> >
> >
> > On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 8:40 AM, Gabriel Scherer <
> gabriel.scherer@gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> >>
> >> > Do others on this list feel the ramp to OCaml adoption is smoother
> than
> >> > my impression suggests?
> >>
> >> I can't speak for "adoption", but I think that you have been very kind
> as
> >> far as user experience is concerned, that it is probably worse than you
> >> suggest.
> >>
> >> We discussed some of these issues a few month ago in a thread launched
> by
> >> Hendrik Bloom:
> >>
> >>   Is OCaml for experienced beginners?
> >>   Hendrik Bloom, December 2015
> >>   https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list/2015-12/msg00077.html
> >>
> >> I gave a few remarks on the evolution of the OCaml ecosystem on the
> period
> >> I know of that you may be interested in:
> >>   https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list/2015-12/msg00110.html
> >>
> >> I think "adoption" and "usability" are interlinked but separate issues.
> >>
> >> Getting adoption distributes the number of people interesting in helping
> >> on usability, so it tends to improve usability, but I tend to think
> that the
> >> second is actually the more interesting, important goal to aim at.
> >>
> >> Adoption is interesting but, as Tony Hoare put it, we are not fashion
> >> designers. The best thing I can think of is to communicate more and
> better,
> >> talk about the cool world that is being done in the OCaml communities,
> and
> >> importantly talking about it outside it. Supporting software projects
> that
> >> have a potential for impact outside the OCaml community is also key --
> Coq,
> >> MLdonkey, Coccinelle, Flow, the SLAM static verifier toolkit, just to
> name a
> >> few.
> >>
> >> Regarding usability, I think the tooling ecosystem is too complex today.
> >> If I wanted to bootstrap a beginner to do stuff I would have to tell
> them
> >> about the OCaml compiler tools (ocamlc, ocamlopt), ocamlfind, a build
> system
> >> (omake or ocamlbuild for example), oasis, Merlin, opam, and get them to
> >> learn either Vim or Emacs. That's a bit too much and even with the
> plethora
> >> of tools there are problems we haven't really solved yet -- for
> example, how
> >> to avoid module name conflicts.
> >> I think a lot more work is required, both incremental improvements and a
> >> few grand redesigns, before we reach a comfortable ecosystem where
> starting
> >> an OCaml project feels like a breeze. That's what I would aim at.
> >>
> >>> Who here is excited about making OCaml approachable to newcomers? Where
> >>> is the main ongoing work on this? Who are the main leaders from this
> >>> perspective?
> >>
> >>
> >> This is an interesting question. To my knowledge, no one is specifically
> >> focused on this mightily important question. But it's fair to assume
> that we
> >> have no "usability team" today, it's more a distributed collection of
> >> efforts going in all directions from various people, for example:
> >>
> >> - Gerd Stolpmann did a lot of work on the early language tooling,
> notably
> >> GODI (an earlier ocaml-specific package manager) and ocamlfind, and also
> >> kept very high documentation standards that are an example to follow.
> >>
> >> - Sylvain le Gall's work on OASIS helps a lot of developers do their
> >> packaging by encapsulating, in particular, the knowledge of what to
> install
> >> where (not a simple question).
> >>
> >> - The OPAM team as a whole, as well as the maintainers of the public
> opam
> >> repository, have done tremendous work making OCaml software easy to
> install
> >> and deploy. (Windows is still of a sore point, but there is progress in
> that
> >> area. It's a distinct possibility that the OCaml ecosystem will become
> nice
> >> to use on Windows before Windows disappears or gets a real Unix
> userland.)
> >>
> >> I would personally be interested in helping someone with a holistic
> >> approach to usability devote as much of their time as they can. (I think
> >> there are some sources of funding that could be considered, but nothing
> very
> >> certain; from a crowd-funding perspective I would be glad to pay €30 a
> month
> >> to fund such a position.) I think this is a difficult position because
> there
> >> is a lot of thankless grunt work implied, and arguably it's not a very
> >> career-advancing move.
> >>
> >> On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 8:57 AM, Dean Thompson <
> deansherthompson@gmail.com>
> >> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> Thank you, everyone, for the responses and discussion. If there is
> >>> interest, I would still love to hear more thoughts about whether there
> is a
> >>> roadmap (either de facto from the community, or explicit from leaders
> of the
> >>> community) to foster broader adoption.
> >>>
> >>> I see that many organizations are making immense contributions to the
> >>> community: from language and ecosystem enhancements, to Real World
> OCaml, to
> >>> the OCaml Users and Developers Workshop. Technical progress is rapid.
> But so
> >>> far, to me, these wonderful contributions feel more like giving back
> to the
> >>> community for us to make what we can of them, rather than anyone’s
> >>> systematic effort to streamline broader uptake of OCaml.
> >>>
> >>> These are the impressions of a newcomer. If there is interest, I would
> >>> love to hear more seasoned viewpoints.
> >>>
> >>> Dean
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> --
> >>> Caml-list mailing list.  Subscription management and archives:
> >>> https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list
> >>> Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
> >>> Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
> >>
> >>
> >
> >
>
> --
> Caml-list mailing list.  Subscription management and archives:
> https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list
> Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
> Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
>

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